


Failed Plots

by Aesoleucian



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, M/M, babyteen pining, mom friend bertrand baudelaire, more or less
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-04-29 05:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14466300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Bertrand is continually surprised by how Lemony Snicket can be as paranoid, as unwilling to share any part of himself as he is, and also say everything he says so bluntly. He is curled up in the armchair next to Bertrand, and he has just said, “Do you know, I hated you before I ever met you. I thought you were extremely stupid.”





	1. Renascence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [For reference.](http://papoose-yacht.com/images/papoose-from-back.jpg)

Bertrand is continually surprised by how Lemony Snicket can be as paranoid, as unwilling to share any part of himself as he is, and also say everything he says so bluntly. He is curled up in the armchair next to Bertrand, and he has just said, “Do you know, I hated you before I ever met you. I thought you were extremely stupid.”

“Would you care to tell me why,” says Bertrand after a pause, “or are you just exercising your inalienable right to be mysterious?”

“Let me decide,” says Snicket, although he decided before he said anything.  He puts a bookmark in his book so he can close it theatrically. “We have a mutual acquaintance whom I never talk about because I can’t stand her, but she did mention that you were the perfect apprentice. I believe she used the phrase ‘never gave me any trouble whatsoever,’ which solidified you in my mind as a total oaf. Any volunteer who never gives anyone trouble isn’t doing their job.” Well, that does explain why, the first time Beatrice introduced them, Snicket gave him a dark look and said _Oh, I’ve heard_ all _about Bertrand_.

Bertrand gives him the look that he usually identifies as both exasperated and long-suffering, which Bertrand is. “Snicket, giving your own chaperone trouble isn’t the kind of job you’re supposed to be doing. If you give your chaperone trouble while trying to go behind her back, it just means you aren’t very subtle.”

“Maybe it means circumstances beyond my control forced me to abandon subtlety as a possible tactic,” says Snicket, but he says it sulkily as if he knows that’s not the case. He still resents Bertrand for being cleverer than him, whether or not it’s actually true. Personally Bertrand kind of admires how he manages to retain his wit and moral fortitude under extreme stress, but as it’s not the stated goal of V.F.D. Snicket doesn’t much care.

“Did you have a point,” asks Bertrand amiably, “or did you just want to insult me and pretend you weren’t? Because we do have research we could be doing.”

“It was just an idle thought,” Snicket mutters, and opens his book again.

It clearly wasn’t an idle thought, so what was it? Lemony Snicket is, as they say, a riddle wrapped in a mystery set inside an enigma, and though Bertrand has been applying his usual patience to the Snicket problem for three months now he hasn’t gotten much of anywhere. In some ways Snicket is extremely transparent—he cannot possibly be stopped from speaking his mind, and his insecurities practically shout themselves to the world. But Bertrand has not yet figured out how to get along with him. When they were assigned this mission together he went to Beatrice to ask if she had any advice. She laughed at him and said, _Try to be interesting, though I know it’s a strain for you. Also, he likes to argue_.

Bertrand does not like to argue. It’s a waste of time. Unfortunately, he’s starting to think that Beatrice was right that it’s the only way to keep Snicket’s attention.

Why does he want so badly to keep Snicket’s attention?

He glances sideways, over the top of the chart he’s been staring at without seeing it. Snicket is hunched over his book, scribbling notes in an illegible shorthand of his own devising. His heavy brow is furrowed, and he’s chewing on one thumbnail, and as usual he seems like he was born straight out of a poet’s head from the words _My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night_. Feverish, frenetic, occasionally furious, and other words that start with F. Never, for instance, quiescent, even when he is quiet.

And like the candle, he gives a lovely light.

Suddenly embarrassed, Bertrand jerks his head back around to his chart, and immediately regrets it when in his periphery he sees Snicket look around at the movement. He studies the chart with great determination and focus, so that a mere fifteen seconds later he can say something useful. Something that only a person who had been concentrating this whole time would know. “It’s probably the Risible Reef we want. The currents are about right, and it’s the only place on this part of the coast that has the right water temperature. So much so that it’s anomalous. Do you want to double-check that I’m looking for the right specifications?” Snicket flips through his notebook and then holds it out. “You know I can’t read this.”

“If we’re going to be partners, don’t you think you should learn?”

As far as Bertrand knows they aren’t going to be partners for very long. Unless Snicket intends to request another assignment with him, which would be absurd considering how much he seems to dislike him. Nevertheless he leans over to look at the notebook and says, “All right, so teach me.”

It’s only when Bertrand accidentally brushes Snicket’s knuckles while trying to point to a scribble in the notebook, and feels like he’s just been pushed down an elevator shaft again, that he realizes how much trouble he’s really in.

 

Snicket seems to like teaching Bertrand. He has an air of quiet smugness when Bertrand admits he hasn’t taken _Secret Panels, Trapdoors, and Nooks_ yet in the basement of the lighthouse. He recites a long section of _The Waste Land_ from memory so that Bertrand can memorize it too and they’ll be able to use it for Verse Fluctuation Declarations. He could have just written it down or told Bertrand to go back to the library, but he says it will give Bertrand a chance to practice Snicket Shorthand.

In return, while they’re up late waiting for the _Yersinia_ to round Rancorous Rock, Bertrand recites some poetry too.

 

> “All I could see from where I stood  
>  Was three long mountains and a wood;  
>  I turned and looked another way,  
>  And saw three islands in a bay.  
>  So with my eyes I traced the line  
>  Of the horizon, thin and fine,  
>  Straight around till I was come  
>  Back to where I'd started from;  
>  And all I saw from where I stood  
>  Was three long mountains and a wood.
> 
> “Over these things I could not see;  
>  These were the things that bounded me;  
>  And I could touch them with my hand,  
>  Almost, I thought, from where I stand.  
>  And all at once things seemed so small  
>  My breath came short, and scarce at all.
> 
> “But, sure, the sky is big, I said;  
>  Miles and miles above my head;  
>  So here upon my back I'll lie  
>  And look my fill into the sky.  
>  And so I looked, and, after all,  
>  The sky was not so very tall.  
>  The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,  
>  And—sure enough!—I see the top!  
>  The sky, I thought, is not so grand;  
>  I 'most could touch it with my hand!  
>  And reaching up my hand to try,  
>  I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
> 
> “I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity  
>  Came down and settled over me;  
>  Forced back my scream into my chest,  
>  Bent back—

“Is that it?”

Snicket, who has been alternately watching Bertrand’s recitation and the half-cloudy sky, straightens up with a jerk to squint into the darkness over the bay. “I don’t see what other ship it could be. Come on.” And he’s stuffing his telescope hurriedly into an inside pocket of his coat, practically vaulting down the rocks toward their rowboat. “You’d better finish that poem, though,” he calls over his shoulder.

“I don’t have the whole thing memorized. It’s something like three hundred lines long.”

“Then you can read it to me later. You have a good voice for poetry. Now be quiet.”

Snicket seems to have a knack for cutting off conversations in the most irritating possible place. Bertrand wants to ask him just what he means by that, but they really do need to be quiet as they untie the boat and start carefully rowing out toward Risible Reef and the sinister yacht that has just dropped anchor there.

Bertrand rows, because he’s spent more time on the water and is the quieter of the two, while Snicket keeps watch. “Row around to the far side,” he says. “Two divers just went down off the port bow.”

In the shadow of the _Yersinia_ Snicket stands to tie up the rowboat, and Bertrand almost catches his legs to steady him, but spends so long second-guessing himself that he still hasn’t made a decision when Snicket whispers, “Let’s go,” and hoists himself up onto the railing. A moment later he hears “Clear!” from up on deck and follows.

They can see through the windows of the small cabin that there are three people on the port side, but no-one inside. The lights are on, so they’ll have to be very careful. He follows Snicket’s lead and stays low as they split up—Snicket to the table and Bertrand to the conspicuous chest pushed under the bench by the steering wheel.

Inside the chest are untidy stacks of paper—mostly sea charts and sailing aids, from a quick glance. But some of them might be notes on the rare molluscs that _Yersinia_ ’s crew are hunting on the Risible Reef. He’s so absorbed in sorting through the papers that he doesn’t register Snicket’s hiss until his fingers almost get crushed by the lid of the chest. Snicket pulls him down under the bench by the collar of his jacket and clamps his hand unnecessarily over Bertrand’s mouth. They lie awkwardly curled together in the bench’s shadow, listening to their own breathing and the heavy footsteps of an adult.

“I’ll be right back out,” the woman calls. “You can handle staring at the water for thirty seconds without me?”

Bertrand is trying to concentrate on tracking her around the room with his eyes closed as she mutters and lifts up stray papers, but Snicket’s sweaty hand is still over his mouth and Snicket’s body is still awkwardly draped over his legs and his heart is going like the engine of a freight train. He can feel Snicket’s pulse, too, in the fingers pressed into his cheek.

“Ah, here it is,” says the woman, and she walks out of the cabin again. Outside they can hear her say, “Just a little after half past.”

Bertrand peels Snicket’s hand off and whispers, “Try not to suffocate me next time, please.”

“Sorry,” says Snicket, looking away and already unfolding himself to a crouch. “Did you find what we’re looking for?”

“Maybe. Give me a few more minutes.”

“There was nothing useful on the table,” says Snicket, by way of explanation when he wedges his shoulder into Bertrand’s and leans over the chest too. With the two of them looking it’s quick work, and Bertrand keeps watch while Snicket copies down the notes in unbelievably fast shorthand.

“Take the rest, or leave it?” Bertrand asks him.

Snicket grimaces. “Leave it. We don’t want them moving their operation before we can get this back to headquarters. And it won’t stop them, anyway.”

As Bertrand slips under the railing and into the rowboat, he can hear the divers surfacing on the port side, and the voices of the other crewmembers asking to see what they’ve brought up. “We’ve had better hauls,” says someone. “We’re going to have to move soon…”

Bertrand raises his eyebrows at Snicket, who nods over the railing.

Briefly, the moon comes out from behind the clouds, silhouetting Snicket with a sort of silver halo around him. It’s striking—so much so that one of the divers notices. “Company!” he spits.

Snicket crouches and frantically starts untying the knot holding the rowboat in place. “You have a knife, don’t you?” Bertrand hisses.

“Probably.” Snicket glances over his shoulder as two of the crew round the cabin. “I’ll see you on the train, Baudelaire,” he says, and pushes the stern of the rowboat hard with his foot. A moment later a hand grabs the collar of his jacket and he’s jerked to his feet. Bertrand barely has the presence of mind to start rowing before one of the divers can dive into the boat. Because a rower always faces sternward, Bertrand has to watch while Snicket struggles to free himself from a much larger man’s grasp, wriggling out of his jacket to sprint for the bow.

Bertrand wouldn’t be able to help him anyway, with a crew of five adults. But it still feels like abandonment as he rows away, uncertain whether he really will see Snicket on the train home.

 

That uncertainty lasts the rest of the night as Bertrand sits sleepless in the abandoned lighthouse clutching the notebook Snicket must have thrown overboard as he was leaving. It lasts all morning as Bertrand walks to the nearest taxi stand to get a ride into town, and all afternoon as he sits at the rendezvous point picking at a sandwich. He has come solidly to the conclusion that he should have gotten captured too to make it easier for both of them to escape, and spent an hour writing down what he should do better next time, and now he has nothing to do with his hands but can’t concentrate on his book. The clock ticks toward 6:40. He checks again that he has two tickets. He does.

“Sorry to make you wait,” says Snicket’s voice behind him, and he tries to jump out of his seat while turning around, causing him to stumble until Snicket grabs him by the shoulder. He looks up at Snicket’s face, relieved to find him looking as impassive and vaguely contemptuous as always, and then looks down at the puddle he’s standing in. Snicket follows his gaze and one eyebrow twitches as if he’s thinking about raising it. “I had to tip a lot to get a taxi driver who wouldn’t mind if I soaked their seats. Is the train at the platform yet?”

Bertrand snatches up the tickets and the book he was trying to read and frowns at the departures sign as he starts walking. Snicket follows, shoes making comical squishing noises with every step.

“You could have just jumped off the yacht in the first place,” Bertrand tells him. “If you were going to swim anyway, you might as well have swum to the rowboat.”

“Didn’t think of it at the time. Did you get me a ticket?”

“Yes. I’ll hold it for you. You’d get it wet.”

Snicket sits down first and starts wringing out his hat onto the floor, presumably for dramatic effect. Bertrand snaps the compartment door shut and sits down across from him. Finally they have the privacy for a good telling-off. “I hope you don’t intend to make a habit of that.”

“Of course not,” says Snicket. “How often am I going to be robbing yachts?”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. It’s a bad idea to get separated, and you didn’t even have a good reason. You just think you’re a lightningrod for danger, as if that’s some sort of noble calling. It’s just going to get you killed.”

Snicket looks up, and stops wringing his hat. “So that’s what it takes to get a rise out of you. I was starting to wonder if it was possible. You don’t like to argue. I thought the manhandling would do it, but you’re like a doll.”

“Yes,” Bertrand snaps, “all it took was you doing something genuinely extremely stupid and dangerous. I hope it was worth it for you.”

Snicket takes a long breath, and turns it into a long sigh, leaning back against his seat with his head lolling back. His hair is an absolute mess in a way that makes Bertrand compulsively want to comb it. All of a sudden he looks very tired, like he’s finally dropped whatever tension was keeping him upright. Bertrand realizes he must have swum all the way to shore and then walked, without sleep or even any rest. “It was,” he says.

Bertrand doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing. By the time the conductor comes in to ask for their tickets, Snicket has fallen asleep and slumped over onto the window.

He wakes up an hour or two later, which process involves a lot of unfortunately charming slow blinking, and then declares his intention to go to the café car to find some food. He does not ask if Bertrand wants anything, although Bertrand is beginning to get hungry again now that he doesn’t fear for his associate’s life. When Snicket comes back he says, “Would you mind if I sat next to you? The other seat is wet.”

“Feel free,” says Bertrand. Snicket seems to take this as an invitation to read over his shoulder, so finally he says, “Yes, I did promise I’d finish reading you that poem.”

“To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,” says Snicket. “Who neither listen nor speak; who do not drink their tea, though they always said tea was such a comfort.”

Bertrand looks up at him, surprised that he memorized the stanza from a quick glance. “That poem is strange. It doesn’t have rhyme or meter, unlike most of her poems.”

“We haven’t found rhyme and meter yet, when death is so fresh. We haven’t quite grown up.”

“Not until we reach the end of the poem, no,” Bertrand agrees.

“Your tea is cold now,” Snicket says, and begins to list toward Bertrand, peering at the closed book in his lap. “You drink it standing up, and leave the house. There. Now we’re adults. Tell me about the weight of infinity.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works cited:  
> 1\. First Figs, Edna St. Vincent Millay.  
> 2\. Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay.  
> 3\. Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, Edna St. Vincent Millay.


	2. & Some Are Picnicking

Beatrice looks the two of them over, and then nods in apparent satisfaction. “Good catch,” she says. Bertrand looks at Snicket, hoping he’ll know what that means, but Snicket is just frowning at Beatrice as if he, too, is trying to decode her words. Beatrice, who delights in confusion, smiles brightly at them and says, “L., you look like a drowned rat. Can I persuade you two to have sandwiches, maybe some soup?”

“I’m always easily persuaded when there’s food in the offing,” says Snicket immediately. They both turn, in eerie synchronicity, to look at Bertrand.

“There’s no need to stare like you were expecting me to say no,” he says, affronted. “I like sandwiches and soup as much as anyone.” And when they get to the kitchen: “On one condition. You have to sit down and limit your input to kibbitzing, Snicket. Pretending not to be exhausted has to be almost as exhausting as swimming across the bay in the first place.”

“You did all the rowing,” says Snicket, clearly attempting to look haughty. “You should be just as tired.”

But he sits down, because Beatrice is looking at him with interest, calculating the most efficient way to get him to spill what happened. Bertrand is more than willing to let her make a game of it. He’s not in the habit of being petty, but it really is what Snicket deserves.

However, Beatrice doesn’t go for the obvious question. She says, “So, you two are friends now?”

“B. has a nice voice for reading poetry,” says Snicket with dignity. He’s starting to fold a napkin into what looks like it will eventually be a flower. “And interesting taste. I would have thought Swinburne or Coleridge.”

“I don’t only know one poet, Snicket.”

“I almost find it more unbelievable that B. has found something to like about _you_.”

Bertrand imagines a withering glare is going on behind his back, but he is peacefully slicing radishes thin and has no need to look. How could he even describe why he likes Snicket without embarrassing himself?

“I find it unbelievable too,” says Snicket. “But the thing about Baudelaire is that he’s far too nice.”

“You’ve never seen him talking to someone he dislikes,” Beatrice notes. He’s not sure if he can even describe to _himself_ why he likes Snicket so much without being embarrassed. He recalls the candle metaphor and feels his ears grow hot. Thank goodness he’s facing away and they’re not paying attention.

“What are you thinking about, Bertrand,” says Beatrice in his ear, and he yelps and almost cuts off his finger.

“Don’t surprise people with knives, B.,” he says, sucking on his finger. “And I mean that in every possible way.”

“What if I got you a pocket knife as a surprise gift?”

Snicket’s hand inserts itself between them with an adhesive bandage and a tube of antiseptic cream. “Thank you,” says Bertrand as he takes them. “I have a pocket knife already.”

When he’s finished applying the bandage he goes to continue slicing the radishes, but Snicket is doing it instead. “I thought I told you to sit down,” says Bertrand crossly.

“I know. I’m incorrigible,” Snicket deadpans. “You’re the one who’s injured, why don’t you sit down?”

Bertrand gives up and slumps in Snicket’s vacated chair. Maybe he _is_ tireder than Snicket from having to deal with two extremely energetic and contrary associates. Or from the emotional trials of the last three days. Exactly once in every Jane Austen novel, it seems, one of the protagonists gets very sick from a combination of emotional turmoil and being wet for a while. Combined, Snicket and Bertrand make one damp and upset minor aristocrat, and if there is any justice perhaps Snicket will get sick too. He really does still look like a drowned rat, because he hasn’t bothered to comb his hair since he walked out of the bay, although generally he seems to find personal hygiene pretty important. How suspicious would he be if Bertrand took a comb to his hair? Beatrice has said they are friends now, and since Snicket is never going to say it Bertrand supposes he should believe her.

And really, if Snicket can manhandle him to get a rise out of him, he has the right to return the favor.

He unfolds his pocket knife and takes a few tries to find the comb attachment. Then he stands and says, “Hold still, Snicket.”

Snicket turns around and eyes him. “Most of the people who have ever told me to hold still were about to do something unpleasant to me.”

“Your hair is bothering me.”

Beatrice is laughing a few feet away, but Bertrand ignores her in favor of looking insouciant while Snicket, eyes narrowed, tries to read his intentions. “If it saves time,” Snicket says finally, and turns back to slicing Swiss cheese. So Bertrand starts combing his hair. It’s very tangled, and it probably hurts, but he doesn’t make any noise of complaint, or even get distracted from heating up the frying pan and melting butter in it.

“Do you want pears, B.?” he asks.

“Yes,” says Beatrice, while Bertrand says, “No.”

Snicket nods, dislodging Bertrand’s hand, and says, “Pears for some.”

“He likes when you pet his hair,” Beatrice advises, when Bertrand makes it to the front of Snicket’s hair.

“Every time you try to pet my hair you get slapped.”

“To hide your love of being petted. It’s really tragic and you should just admit it.”

“Fine, I admit it. I just like having an excuse to slap you. Bertrand, you’re blocking the pan.” Bertrand hastily steps out of the way so Snicket can put his sandwich in the pan, and receives an entirely undeserved glare for his trouble. Snicket runs a hand through his hair, combing it down with his fingers, and then says, “Good enough. I’ll take a shower later anyway. Go sit down.”

Bertrand wants to tell him to sit down himself, but he really doesn’t like arguing. Beatrice beats him to it. “Both of you sit down. B. is injured and L. apparently fell in the ocean, and I have two perfectly fine legs.”

“They _are_ fine,” says Snicket gravely, and gets smacked for his impudence. He surrenders the pan and sits next to Bertrand, in the seat that commands the best view of the stove.

“Tell me about falling in the ocean, by the way,” says Beatrice.

“Sometimes it is unavoidable, and to escape from a yacht crewed by villainous mollusc-hunters one must jump overboard and swim to shore.”

“In this case it was not unavoidable,” says Bertrand. “He could have swum to the rowboat, but he instead elected to be captured and spend the night tied up on the deck of the yacht out of a misplaced sense of heroics.”

Snicket gives him a withering look, to which Bertrand responds with his well-worn ‘if you didn’t want me to rat you out you shouldn’t have done something stupid’ look, although this is the first time he’s used it on Snicket. Snicket seems to be giving him a very complicated look in return, but Bertrand has never been especially skilled at reading into facial expressions, so he shrugs.

Snicket sighs. “He won’t even argue with his face.”

“You still have me,” says Beatrice. “I’ll argue all day. Oh! Hello, O. Hello, K.”

A girl and a boy have just entered, both clearly a few years older than Bertrand and both with prominent unibrows, like Snicket. Bertrand knows of them, probably, but he has only heard them referred to by their initials. O. shared Beatrice’s chaperone until recently, but he’s not sure what relation K. has to them.

“There you are, Lem,” says K. “I’m glad you made it back safe.”

“I’m glad you managed to escape from prison,” says Snicket. “How’s… never mind.”

K. sits down next to Snicket, while O. slouches over to try and get a sandwich out of Beatrice. “She escaped too,” says K. “She wouldn’t tell me where she was going next, probably because she knew I would tell you. All your associates from Stain’d—”

“I would rather not talk about this here, K.”

K. looks curiously over at O. and Beatrice, and then at Bertrand. “All right. I don’t think we’ve met, by the way. I’m Kit Snicket.” She leans over Snicket to offer her hand, and he shakes it.

“Bertrand Baudelaire.”

“Oh! _This_ is the famous Bertrand. Lem has complained all about you.”

He glances at Snicket, who appears to be pouting. He never made any secret of his dislike, and outright told Bertrand that he hated him even before they met, but it still stings a little. “Leave it alone, K.,” he mutters. “He’s fine. He likes Millay.”

Bertrand can’t help find it significant that his taste in poetry is the only thing Snicket can find to like about him.

“Does he,” says Kit, as if this were a much more revealing fact than it actually is. “What are your feelings on Borges?”

Bertrand has only read one short story by Borges, one that concerned imaginary artifacts becoming more real than reality and supplanting the true world. It frightened him horribly, and for the rest of the day he sat in the apricot tree in the garden, refusing to come down. But because this is a test, he can’t make conclusions based on such a small dataset. “Surrealism can make one uneasy and afraid,” he says carefully, “but perhaps that is its principle value.”

“Hmm,” says Kit.

“Hmm,” says Snicket, although he might just be mocking her.

“Why does this sandwich have pears in it?” says O. from the direction of the stove.

“Because it’s my sandwich. Feel free to make your own.”

“And radishes,” says O. “Who puts radishes in a sandwich? What’s next, arugula?”

“No-one is forcing you to eat it—don’t you dare pick them out. Give it here.” The three of them watch a tragedy in the making as Beatrice and O. fight over the sandwich, and sure enough it falls onto the floor, splattering melted butter and scattering radishes and slices of pear. Bertrand looks mournfully at it, a very good sandwich rendered inedible by infighting.

O. picks it up off the floor and takes another bite, then starts kicking the radish slices under the stove. Beatrice glares at him, and he shrugs and says, “Waste not, want not.”

“Are you going to clean up the floor? It’s your fault.”

“If you hadn’t fought me over it this wouldn’t have happened. It’s equally your fault.”

“Blitzkrieg,” mutters Snicket.

Out loud Kit says, “Stop yelling, _I’ll_ clean it up. Someone has to, and if you’re too busy arguing then I’ll do it.”

“Don’t train him to make a fuss until someone else cleans up his messes,” says Beatrice.

“It’s _just_ a sandwich,” says O.

Bertrand edges behind them all to rescue the two sandwiches in the pan from burning, turns off the gas for safety’s sake, and returns to the table with a plate for him and Snicket. “I think this one has pear,” he says softly, so as not to disturb the argument.

“So it does,” says Snicket. “Thanks.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works Cited:  
> 1\. Plaques. Jenny Holzer. The full poem is as follows:  
>  BODIES LIE IN THE BRIGHT GRASS  
>  AND SOME ARE MURDERED  
>  AND SOME ARE PICNICKING


	3. Bitter as Wormwood

“I’m not sure there are any frogs in this pond,” says Snicket.

“Of course there are. You can hear them.”

“Those could be cleverly concealed sound transmitting devices.”

Bertrand has to laugh at that. “No they couldn’t. They stop peeping when we get close. You’re very bad at pretending to be a normal boy.”

“Oh?” says Snicket, raising his eyebrow sardonically. “Could it be because I’ve never met a normal boy in my life?”

“You’ve _read_ about them at least. The books made catching frogs sound much easier, I must say. Oh! Look, there’s one, sitting on that rock.”

“What’s the plan of attack?”

Bertrand starts to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and Snicket’s smothered chuckle follows. It’s a lovely sound. He doesn’t laugh often. “I think the plan of attack is you just kind of jump on it. Go on.”

“This was your plan. I think you should jump on it.”

Bertrand pushes him toward the frog. He just kind of jumps on it. The frog plops into the water, and Snicket splashes into the water, and when he stands up again he is as wet as a frog and as reproachful as Lemony Snicket. He has some pondscum dripping down his shoulder. “Don’t you laugh at me, Bertrand Baudelaire. You’re liable to get pushed into a pond.”

“You’re liable to have to catch me before you can push me.”

As it turns out, Snicket is much faster than he thought in the water. He has the advantage that he can’t get any wetter, so he just swims, grabs hold of Bertrand’s legs, and yanks him off his feet. About thirty seconds into a really promising water wrestling match Bertrand notes a woman in a dark suit sitting down at a bench next to an old man, putting down several bags of groceries between them. He gets Snicket in a headlock, with some difficulty, and whispers in his ear, “Don’t look now but the meeting is starting. We’ll want to get out of the water in a bit so we can be free to follow more inconspicuously.”

Snicket squirms out of his grip and splashes a great deal of pondscum at him. “Will there be whooping?” he asks. “Usually in the books there’s whooping, but I don’t know the mechanics of it.”

“Just make whatever loud sounds feel natural. Oi! You’ll pay for that!”

Snicket does not pay for that, because he splashes his way out of the pond and starts sprinting across the grass. “Catch me if you can!” he yells over his shoulder.

Bertrand is pretty sure he can, because he has longer legs. Snicket’s kind of fast is good for dodging through crowds because he’s small, but in a straight sprint Bertrand will take the race. And he does, he tackles Snicket about fifteen feet behind the bench where a woman has just knocked over her bags of groceries, giving an old man the opportunity to pick up her receipt and slip it into his pocket. Bertrand guesses the man is about to get up, so he springs to his feet and says, “You’re it!” and runs in the direction the woman didn’t come from. When he glances back to see if Snicket’s following, he is; and the old man is too.

“Not fair,” Snicket calls in his whiny child voice, the one he kept using to make Beatrice laugh so she’d forget she asked him to do her a favor. “You’re faster than me!”

“Get taller, then,” says Bertrand, but he turns around and waits, like he’s teasing his friend. He dances out of the way at the last second, but Snicket trips him up with his legs and he goes down on top of him. There’s a confusing moment that’s nothing but grass and sky and the weight of two bodies, and somehow Snicket emerges victorious. He grins down at Bertrand for a few seconds that almost make Bertrand’s heart stop, and then he glances up.

“He looks like he’s going to cross the street to Penteghast. Ugh, I hope you packed towels.”

Bertrand shoves him off with some regret and starts getting up. “Of course I did. I predicted the eventuality that starting a water fight would be a good way to maintain our cover. Come on, let’s get our shoes and go home.”

“What do you think your mom will make,” says Snicket in the whiny child voice, although he’s not whining. “I hope she got pumpernickel. I want a jam sandwich.”

Bertrand shoves him again and runs past him toward where they left their shoes on the shore of the pond. Every moment they delay struggling to put socks on wet feet is a moment they might lose their target. “Jam sandwiches are for losers,” he says, straining even his own credulity about what a real fourteen-year-old would say. Snicket laughs at that, and even though Bertrand knows it’s a performance it has enough realism that he probably does think it’s very funny. “Look, turkey and Swiss is better. And pumpernickel is the worst kind of rye. I’m sorry about my fake bread opinions, I can’t think of anything better to argue about.”

Snicket knocks into him as he runs past, and calls over his shoulder, “Last one there is a rotten egg.”

 

Lucky for them, the mark hasn’t been walking very fast. It allows them to run until they’re convincingly breathless and then slow to his pace. He even glances at them, but seems to dismiss two wet children who keep shoving each other as unlikely to be spies. At least, he doesn’t try to lose them. Around the time that he goes into a building—a barbershop—two wet children get distracted from going home to lunch and decide to climb a tree across the street.

“It’s so strange,” Snicket mutters, shifting until he’s comfortable against the trunk. “Pretending to be children. Knowing we’re actually believable to someone.”

“We are children, Snicket. We just happen to have some extra skills and large vocabularies.”

Snicket gives him a weary look. “Maybe you are. My tea has been cold for a long time now. I drank it standing up, and you’ll never guess how it tasted.”

“Bitter as wormwood,” says Bertrand. “But we save people. That’s what children are _supposed_ to believe in.”

“Sometimes we do awful things to save people. Having a good reason doesn’t prevent the things you’ve done from being awful, it just means you’d do them again.”

Bertrand frowns down at the barbershop. He’s _worried_ for Snicket. His friend is sometimes withdrawn, and maybe he sometimes disappears for a couple days, but he always turns up again acting like everyone else is a fool for wondering where he was. “What did you do that was so awful?” He glances at Snicket, who’s looking away. “What could you _possibly_ have done—”

“I killed someone,” Snicket snaps.

Bertrand doesn’t say anything. The worst thing to say right now is that he’s not surprised, but he’s not. Snicket does have that air about him, sometimes, when he’s not talking to anyone, the air of someone quietly hating himself. And the way he will try to sacrifice himself for someone else at the drop of a hat, even when it’s not at all necessary.

“Say something,” Snicket says in a low voice. “Say that you never want to speak to me again. Say you’re disgusted. Say that you thought I was a good person.”

“There’s no such thing as a good person,” says Bertrand. “Only people who continue to try to do good things.”

“What if they fail, Bertrand? What if they fail again and again and again? What if they try to do good things and every time it turns out they’ve done something bad? I didn’t have to kill him. I don’t know that it helped anyone, in the end. At the time it seemed like the only thing to do, but it wasn’t. I am so afraid that what I have been made into, what I have made myself into, can’t… I’m afraid I will always make that easy choice.”

Bertrand reaches back to grab Snicket’s hand—he was looking away, but now he jerks around and nearly meets Bertrand’s eyes. “Of course it’s difficult,” Bertrand says softly. “It’s… I’m sorry, I’m not very good with words. I’ve always admired your moral fortitude in stressful situations. I think you’re not seeing the whole picture, only the parts that upset you the most.”

“You _should_ be disgusted,” says Snicket quietly. “I almost like you less for not being disgusted.”

“I have sound ethical reasons for what I’m saying, based on many years of study. And I know you too well to be disgusted by you. You’re my friend, and that means I’ll always be willing to stop you from doing awful things.”

Snicket sighs, and hunches in on himself, but he doesn’t let go of Bertrand’s hand. He squeezes it tighter, like a lifeline.

 

Later, at the empty streetcar stop, Bertrand gets up the nerve to ask a question he’s been wanting to ask for over a year. “Why is it,” he says, and almost falters as Snicket looks up at him from under his brow, from under the heavy lids of his eyes. “…that whenever someone asks you why you like me—which is rather troublingly common—you say it’s because I have decent taste in poetry?”

“You do,” says Snicket, now looking back down at the newspaper he’s reading, tapping his red marker against his teeth.

“Yes, but that hardly seems like a good reason to stay friends with someone, in the absence of any other reason. Our entire organization is somewhat based on a love of good poetry.”

“I can’t believe you have the nerve to accept my most terrible secret, pledge loyalty to making sure I never do something like it again, hold my hand in a tree, and then say something stupid like that.”

“But you said the poetry thing for a year before that.”

“True.”

“What I mean is that it would be very shallow of you to only spend time with me for poetry recommendations.”

“It would.”

“Avoiding arguments by being laconic is my thing,” Bertrand snaps. “Laconic, in case you didn’t know, is a word that here means—”

“ _Which_ here means.”

“That’s not grammatically correct.”

“It’s a quote, so you may imagine the word _sic_ hovering in the air above my head when I say it. You of all people should know she always said _which_ , even when it was inappropriate. Are you worried about something? I feel like I’m the one who should be nervous.”

“You are nervous,” says Bertrand, and straightens up from where he was leaning against a streetlight. “And what I’m worried about is you. And everything else.”

“Welcome to the club,” says Snicket. He makes a sweeping gesture with his arm, indicating that everyone is a member of this particular club. “I don’t have a coherent answer to your question, because it is my policy to be incoherent in certain areas. But I do consider you a good friend. I should have said that to you when you said it to me, but I didn’t so I’m saying it now. Reading me good poetry is the least among the things you have done to make my life tolerable.”

“Merely tolerable,” says Bertrand. Some of his anxiety is evaporating with the assurance that Snicket does in fact like him rather than merely finding him convenient.

“It wouldn’t do to let you get too swell-headed. My good opinion is not easily won, as you know.” He says it like a joke, but Bertrand knows that whatever happened to him during his very short apprenticeship changed how easy it was to win his good opinion, or at least his trust. Beatrice told Bertrand, when he asked, how Snicket used to be before. Less melancholy, less caustic, more curious. The exact words she used were: _It was tough to get him to shut up for five minutes together_.

Bertrand considers saying what he has been thinking, on and off, for a year; that he is probably in love with Lemony Snicket and it is an honor to make his life tolerable. But he doesn’t think Snicket wants someone to be in love with him. He thinks Snicket would find it frightening, a reason to disappear to the other side of the country so that Bertrand would be spared the dreadful fate of loving him. So he says, instead,

“I’ll keep that in mind.”


	4. Ars Mechanica

Bertrand enjoys missions with Beatrice, because they usually keep him in the city and they are usually related to the theater. He doesn’t have a location-specific specialization, unlike her, so he works with a wide variety of volunteers. And he enjoys it. Right now he is enjoying working with the Uptown Acting Troupe and the mechanical kraken that will be broadcasting unknown information in a sort of sign language.

He has already checked the mechanical systems and the controls, so he wanders around observing as the other actors practice their lines and the costume designers argue over what color the first mate should wear in order to make the symbolism of futility as clear as possible. Most of the members of this troupe are not volunteers, although the director is, so Bertrand hardly knows anyone. That’s all right with him. He doesn’t want to be distracted while he’s trying to work up the nerve to ask Beatrice for advice: what to do about Snicket?

It feels a little strange, because he can’t quite tell if she has a crush on _him_. She’s so free with physical affection that Bertrand isn’t sure if she means it romantically or not. She’s just as likely to swoop on him and kiss his cheek as she Is R. or K. or L., but that doesn’t really preclude her having a crush on all of them. Nevertheless, he doesn’t think anyone else will understand his current problem, as much as he likes H. and F. and even R.

So he knocks on the open door of the break room, and is relieved to see that Beatrice is the only person inside. “Beatrice, I have a question that I think I would like to ask you…”

“You finally want to admit that you’re in love with L. but desperately need my advice,” says Beatrice, turning around in her chair with a sympathetic smile that evokes a teacher talking to a particularly obtuse child. How does she always know what he’s thinking? It’s not like she can read it in his diary!

“I no longer have any questions to ask you. Not if you’re going to be like that about it.”

Beatrice jumps up to grab his shoulders as he tries to walk out the door. “Nonono, come back. I’m sorry for being flippant. I know it’s a very serious issue and I shouldn’t make fun.” He lets her steer him into the chair in front of the mirror and folds his arms defensively, trying not to pout and failing.

“What are _you_ going to do about being in love with him, then,” asks Bertrand, as he is feeling spiteful.

“First, you can’t prove anything because I am much more subtle than you.” Bertrand scoffs loudly, and she rolls her eyes. “Second, I am going to continue to be such an exemplary friend that he cannot bear to leave. Maybe one day he will be less of a skittish wild animal about being liked by people and on that day I will tell him.”

“I have to assume your advice for me is different,” says Bertrand, “because you are a hypocrite.”

“It’s different because you are a different person than me, and not a known schemer. Obviously you should kiss him silly. We could practice, if you want.”

Bertrand eyes her nervously in the mirror. While he _does_ love her to distraction, she seems unsettlingly gung-ho about this, and it’s all very sudden. “I don’t think kissing him and kissing you are going to be at all similar.”

“Just a quick one for luck. I have to be onstage in about a minute, and I promise I won’t laugh if you’re terrible at it.”

That only makes him more nervous, but he does turn around in the chair and kiss her briefly on the mouth. She knocks her forehead against his and laughs—he can’t help laughing too, mostly in relief. “It will make more sense when he’s here,” Beatrice promises.

“That isn’t all I wanted to talk to you about—”

“Later,” she says. “The rehearsal is about to start.”

He watches the rehearsal from the wings when he’s not in the booth operating the kraken. He hasn’t actually had time to read the play, only the stage directions for his machine, so it’s very interesting to watch. Beatrice’s character is the daughter of a sea captain and has a fairly minor part, but she is very compelling as a sullen yet romantic teen. Olaf is there as well, as a young sailor, because they go everywhere together. Bertrand has never quite figured out why the two of them are so inseparable, considering that they don’t actually seem to like each other. When he asked Beatrice, she just said, “Sometimes you need someone to be rude with.”

Snicket, incidentally, despises Olaf. He’s frostily polite, Olaf is snide, and when not in his presence Snicket will complain about everything from his personal hygiene to his taste in poetry. “Why on earth Kit likes him I have no idea,” he often says. But Bertrand understands. Olaf has an air about him of knowing slightly more than you, of being willing to let you in on the secret if he decides you’re interesting. He almost always looks like he’s laughing. Bertrand has an awkward suspicion that if he spent too much time with Olaf he might have another crush to deal with. He can never, ever tell Snicket this.

The kraken performs well, and a few stagehands congratulate Bertrand as they go by. Beatrice runs tearfully offstage and throws herself into his arms, just to put him off balance.

“You were wonderful,” he tells her.

“Your kraken was wonderful! I can’t wait to see what it does in the second act. I wasn’t actually taught the code, but sometimes I can work it out anyway.” She turns keeping one arm hooked around his shoulders so she pulls him along with her. “Now, unless you wanted to see the rest, we can talk about whatever else you wanted to talk about.”

“I have to be in the booth for part of it, but it doesn’t seem like the lighting technicians are here yet. Come on.”

“No, they always come at the last possible minute. Once they didn’t work out the lighting until the dress rehearsal, which was quite the mess. G. yelled at them, and he’s rather frightening when he wants to be, so I think they’ve learned their lesson.” She hops up to sit on the wall of the booth where it overlooks the stage. “So what did you want to talk about?”

“Snicket again, but in a different context. I was _going_ to ask this first, but you have a way of jumping to conclusions.”

“Correct conclusions.”

He ignores that. “I want to form a conspiracy with you, to keep him here. You were away at the same time so you didn’t know, but he was missing for over a week this time. And you know how he is when he comes back.”

“Solemn,” says Beatrice. “Afraid.”

“Daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief,” says Bertrand.

“He really does need to talk to Y., doesn’t he? I find it’s a great comfort.”

“But if he doesn’t even trust _us_ he’ll never tell a rabbi anything.” There’s a gloomy silence, during which Bertrand considers that Y. must have more secret information of all kinds than anyone else in the organization. She may be a confidant even to people on both sides of the schism he’s heard whispers about.

“What’s the plot, then?”

“That’s the thing, I don’t know. I was hoping you would have a way to keep him. You’re a lot more perceptive than me in that area. You’ve always been better able to tell what he’s thinking.”

Beatrice doesn’t reply, staring down at the stage so he can’t read her expression.

“Did he tell you his secret?” he asks. “What happened in Stain’d-by-the-Sea?”

“A couple months after he came back.”

“He only told me last month. He was trying to make me hate him. He was disappointed I wasn’t disgusted by him. I don’t know how to make him let go of an idea like that.”

“The only idea I really have is more hugs, or you seducing him. Sorry.”

“Please don’t use the word ‘seducing,’” says Bertrand weakly.

Beatrice looks around again, finally wearing her sharp smile again. “Which word should I use, then?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea of how to go about it, whatever you call it,” he mumbles. “How do I know when the right time is? What if he doesn’t feel the same way and I—and I kiss him or something and he’s horrified?”

“He told you his worst secret,” says Beatrice scornfully. “Of course he’s in love with you. He has been in love with you since the moment you read him poetry. Please don’t argue, it was extremely obvious when you came back from your first mission together.” At Bertrand’s reproachful and disbelieving expression she gives him a smug look and says, “My profession is to study and reproduce the human condition, and that goes double for my friends. I know the insides of both your heads better than you do.”

“That I can believe. Oh, that’s my cue.”

Beatrice watches as several metal tentacles burst up from center stage and start waving in a pattern that looks random but took hours and hours to get right under G.’s watchful eye. From up here Bertrand can barely hear the actors, but he does know their stage directions, so he can tell when to retract the kraken.

“Anyway,” he says, “just because he’s in love with me—which I’m not sure I believe—that doesn’t mean he wants me to kiss him.”

“He does, though,” says Beatrice, muffled by her hands over her face.

Bertrand is beginning to think that maybe he is being used as a pawn, a canary in the coal mine of Lemony Snicket’s inscrutable emotions. He does not accuse Beatrice of being afraid to move first. He doesn’t resent it. He just doesn’t think it’s going to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works Cited:  
> 1\. Difficult to cite; I think it's a paraphrase of Rabbi Rami Shapiro's commentary on Rabbi Tarfon's section in Pirkei Avot 2.


	5. Oh, do not ask "what is it?"

“I thought it would be nice to get out of the city for a while,” says Bertrand, hoping it’s not too obvious how nervous he is, feeling bizarrely like he is part of a plot to trap Snicket, to betray him. “I know you do all the time, but most of my work is here.”

Snicket looks out the window at the gray trees and the white sky. “It would be nice to get out of the city with you. Normally I’m alone.” Bertrand bumps their shoulders together, which is a Snicket expression he has learned to convey sympathy and comfort. Snicket smiles to himself. “Did you have anywhere particular in mind?”

“I thought we could go to Ibex Island. I’ve heard there are some very interesting plant specimens that only grow there, but I haven’t had a chance to go.”

“Why, Mr. Baudelaire, a guy could think you were trying to get him somewhere far from civilization to murder him and hide the evidence.”

“Or we could get coffee and go to the library!”

Snicket gives him an amused look. “Ibex Island sounds lovely. I have an interest in medicinal plants. I have been reading a book on Appalachian folk medicine, and the author suggests some interesting substitutions. You would not believe how much laudanum it involves…”

Bertrand lets Snicket talk about medicinal plants all the way to the train. It’s no trial, really, because not only is Snicket an engaging speaker but his research is fascinating. Most volunteers around Bertrand’s age have already picked a specialization, but Snicket seems insistent on learning everything about everything. He studies almost desperately, as if he has limited time to cram all the knowledge in the world into his own head. He studies recipes with as much devotion as architectural plans, songbirds as determinedly as political history. Bertrand wants to tell him to slow down, that he isn’t going to die before he’s grown up, but he knows it wouldn’t help.

“How good are you at sailing?” Snicket asks. “I don’t want to row all the way, but I’m mediocre at best.”

“I might be a little rusty, but I don’t think it’s something you forget. If you take the jib I can get the tiller and the mainsail.”

As Bertrand is untying the boat he can hear Snicket muttering to himself, but can’t make out the words. “What’s that?” he asks.

“Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo,” says Snicket, “non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. Just thinking aloud.”

“Let us go then, you and I,” says Bertrand. “Have you read the original, or are you quoting Eliot?”

“As highly as you think of me, you must be aware that I don’t actually speak Italian. I’m about halfway through an English translation right now, though.”

“What made you think of that quote?”

“Just a mood,” says Snicket, looking out over the lake. “Let us go, then.”

The fact that Snicket is in a mood to quote a passage about, if Bertrand is not mistaken, telling the truth only when there is no hope of coming back alive… doesn’t seem like a good sign. “Are you about to leave again?” he asks.

Snicket makes no reply, pretending that catching the cold November wind takes all his concentration, or perhaps pretending that he can’t hear Bertrand over it.

“Whatever it is in the city that you can’t bear, we can protect you from it. Just stay with us.”

“What if it’s you I can’t bear?” says Snicket softly, almost inaudible over the wind and the sound of waves.

“Then as Beatrice would say, you have no business being here at all. I-I’m sorry, that’s such a harsh way to say it. What I mean is that if you really couldn’t stand me, I don’t think you’d be sailing to an uninhabited island with me to look at plant specimens.”

“I don’t deserve either of you,” says Snicket. “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For you to finally understand what it means to be a murderer. For you to realize that I am too—too ethically weak, or something.”

“We aren’t stupid. We’ve taken as many ethics classes as you. I study ethics in my free time, and I know who and what you are because I’ve known you for almost two years. Please understand that the doubt and fear you are feeling are subjective, not grounded in reality. Just because you feel you are a terrible person does not mean other people don’t see you as interesting, admirable, and worthy of love.”

Snicket is hunched in on himself again, looking miserable. Bertrand is silent, unsure what else he can say. After a while he says, “We’re tacking. Mind the boom.”

Snicket minds the boom. At length they reach the island, and tip the boat over onto the sand so it won’t catch the wind. Snicket wanders up the shore, staring into the sky at wheeling gulls instead of looking at Bertrand. As a date, this seems already a failure. As a scheme to convince Snicket not to leave it may also be a failure, but Bertrand doesn’t want to give up yet. He runs to catch up with Snicket and takes his hand. “How do you feel?” he asks.

Snicket is still looking away, but he does answer, softly. “Better, when I’m with you.”

Bertrand squeezes his hand and dares to walk a little closer, so that their shoulders brush. “I’m always happy to hear that I’m making your life more tolerable,” he says.

“More than tolerable,” Snicket whispers.

There’s not going to be a better moment than this. He stops, pulling Snicket back by the hand, and Snicket looks at him. Not amused, not incisive, not even curious. Just waiting.

Bertrand blushes horribly and says, “Can I kiss you?”

Snicket takes a step closer, and another, and Bertrand realizes that Snicket is now taller than him, just barely. “The correct question is _may_ I kiss you,” he says, and Bertrand is halfway through a disbelieving laugh when he finishes, “and the answer is yes. Yes, I wish you had asked sooner.”

Bertrand was right. Kissing Snicket is nothing like kissing Beatrice—it’s gentle and tentative and kind of confused, and it feels like a hard-won victory. Like maybe he might get to keep Lemony Snicket after all.

“There will be time, there will be time,” Snicket murmurs into the narrow space between their mouths, foreheads pressed together. “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

> There will be time to murder and create,  
> And time for all the works and days of hands  
> That lift and drop a question on your plate;  
> Time for you and time for me,  
> And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  
> And for a hundred visions and revisions,  
> Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

He takes a breath. “I know you have arrived at an overwhelming question. Oh, do not ask ‘what is it?’ Let us go and make our visit.”

“You have crossed the line, Mr. Snicket. You are more poem than man.”

“Call me Lemony. No-one calls me that. It’s an embarrassing name. But I think it might be less embarrassing coming from you. You’re so very sincere, Bertrand.”

“Then let us go and make our visit, Lemony. We have plants to harass.”

Lemony closes his eyes for a moment at the sound of his name, and it seems to pull a little involuntary sigh out of him. He straightens up and takes Bertrand’s hand again, and they walk inland to harass the plants.

Later, in the evening when they get home, Beatrice will crow victoriously, “I see you softened him up for me!” and throw herself at Lemony to kiss him full on the mouth. Bertrand will smile at Lemony’s dazed expression and catch Beatrice’s wink over his shoulder. She will beckon Bertrand in for a kiss too and they will both wrap their arms around Lemony as if they can make sure he doesn’t leave.

But for now Bertrand watches Lemony crouched down by a tiny plant growing straight out of the rock, sketching in his notebook with the concentration of a person whose life will depend on it someday. And he offers love the only way he knows how, by reciting a poem he composed about the water on the lake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works Cited:  
> 1\. Inferno, Dante Alighieri.  
> 2\. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot.


	6. Who has never been loyal

He leaves anyway.

Beatrice finds what looks like a letter, undisturbed in the library because on the front is written: _For my two loves, Bertrand and Beatriz_. She comes to Bertrand’s room and they read it together sitting on his bed, and it isn’t a letter. It’s a poem, copied down in Snicket Shorthand as if in a great hurry.

> _Jorge Luis Borges to Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich_
> 
> What can I hold you with?
> 
> I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged suburbs.
> 
> I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
> 
> I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honored in marble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather—just twenty-four—heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
> 
> I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humor my life.
> 
> I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
> 
> I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
> 
> I offer you the memory of yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
> 
> I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
> 
> I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

At the bottom Lemony has written, _I promise I’ll be back_.

Bertrand stares at it, unable to understand, as if his mind keeps skimming across the surface of the poem. Eventually he says, “I didn’t know Borges wrote poetry.”

“Yes, unlike his prose it’s seldom fantastical or notably strange so it isn’t as famous. Next time he leaves we’re going to track him down.”

“We ought to start bugging his room while he’s not here,” says Bertrand, but he doesn’t get up to do so.

“We ought to go through his things and see if he left any clues lying around, says Beatrice, but she doesn’t get up either.

“Do you think there’s any chance—” Bertrand starts, but he runs into Beatrice saying, “I thought this would—” and they both fall silent.

“Ugh,” she says, and falls sideways onto his shoulder. He puts his arm around her and rests his cheek on her hair, the familiar texture of many tiny braids. “It’s not fair,” she says, low and vicious. “I know nothing is fair, but so does Lemony Snicket, and the least he could do is try to fix that, starting here.”

“He thinks repairing the world means only repairing what’s outside himself,” says Bertrand softly. “I don’t know how to change his mind. If what we’ve done isn’t enough, what could be?”

She slowly pulls him over so they’re lying down, curled into each other, holding all four hands in the hollow between their bodies. It feels like a place where Lemony should be, like they’re leaving space for him that he didn’t want to fill. “We keep trying,” she says. “That’s all we can really do, isn’t it?”

 

He comes back almost two weeks later, sad and solemn and nervous to find them at the theater. In fact, he doesn’t say anything, just listens from the seats a couple rows behind G. and the costume director. This time Bertrand is sitting on stage too, playing the part of a minor aristocrat for the space of one scene, and when he glances out at the house and sees Lemony there he completely forgets to come in.

“I didn’t mean to…” prompts G.

Bertrand tears his eyes away from Lemony, puts them on his script, and stammers through his line. He keeps looking back out to make sure that Lemony isn’t going anywhere, and when the scene is over he mutters an excuse and goes around the side of the stage to come out in the empty house, so as not to bother anyone.

“I didn’t know you were an actor,” says Lemony.

Bertrand takes one of his hands and kisses it as he sits down next to him, and is pleased to see him flush faintly. “Everyone’s an actor, in our profession. It’s helping me get more confident talking to people. I’m so glad to see you back—Beatrice has a bigger part, but she’ll come find us after the reading. Did you have a fruitful trip?”

“More or less,” Lemony mutters.

Bertrand holds his hand on the armrest and smiles up at the stage, where Beatrice’s character is getting haughtily angry at a rival. “We read a lot of Borges while you were gone,” he says, although he doesn’t ever want to make it sound like Lemony being gone was a pleasant thing. He just wants to remind him that they were and will always be thinking of him. “The poem you copied for us was beautiful, so we went looking for more, but neither of us reads Spanish very well. So we’ve started a translation project. ‘The meticulous rain is already falling. Falling or fallen. Rain is without a doubt a thing that occurs in the past.’ I understand him better than I do Thomas, but that’s the best I can say for myself.”

Lemony makes a small noise of amusement. “My Spanish is worse, but I’ve always loved translation. I’d love to help, if you’ll have me.”

“You couldn’t stop us,” says Bertrand.

They sit like that, together, with their hands growing steadily sweatier, until Beatrice leaps off the stage and starts walking over the armrests of the seats to get to them.

“You’re on thin ice, B.,” says G. over his shoulder, but she ignores him in favor of pouring herself into Lemony’s lap to kiss him.

“Hullo, Beatrice,” he says, a little dazed.

Bertrand laughs, and Beatrice gives him a _you’re next_ look. “Have you had lunch yet?” she asks. “We’ll make something nice. Chicken soup. We were going to have dinner with K. and O. and C. I know you hate him but O. did promise to make roast beef, and he’s quite a good cook so you should consider it.”

“You have such a busy social life,” Lemony murmurs. “I do like roast beef, but I reserve the right to invent a medical emergency on a moment’s notice.”

“Listen, how long has it been since you saw your brother? Oh, we can get root beer on the way home. Did you know he got hired at the _Daily Punctilio_?”

Lemony pushes Beatrice off his lap so he can stand up, but he then takes her hand like he wants to make sure she doesn’t get too far ahead. “I didn’t. And you know very well that I don’t intend to talk to him.”

“I,” says Beatrice, and pauses dramatically, “will make you. We own and take care of our Snickets! And I happen to be quite fond of K., as I’m sure I would be of J. if she ever had time to introduce us. You know, you would make a good journalist.”

“You mentioned root beer,” he says. There’s a strange moment where both Beatrice and Bertrand simultaneously execute the Snicket Shoulder Bump, causing Lemony to stumble forward slightly and grin down at his shoes.

“I thought that might be the only part you heard,” says Beatrice.

 

It isn’t long before she starts a fight with him. Bertrand is just glad not to be there for it, but he knows it happened because Lemony slinks into his room and curls up as small as possible in the armchair with an enormous atlas and doesn’t say anything at all. He falls asleep there, and later when Beatrice knocks Bertrand has to sneak out and have a whispered argument himself in the hall.

“How is he going to want to stay here with us if you keep making him feel guilty?” he asks.

“How is he ever going to stop doing stupid things if we don’t tell him they’re stupid?” she hisses back. “I don’t even know why he won’t talk to his siblings, and they don’t have a clue either. I thought if he had more people to come home to…”

“You said we have to be patient,” says Bertrand, a little doubtfully. “I’m sure he’ll make up with them eventually.”

“Bertrand?” says Lemony’s voice from inside. “What are you whispering about? Oh.”

“I love you very, very much and I’m so sorry I tried to make you have friends,” Beatrice blurts out. “I mean, I’m not, but I’m sorry I made you cry. I would really like to figure out how to give you suggestions on being happier without making you cry, or possibly to know why you won’t talk to your siblings. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” says Lemony, looking down. “And if I knew I would tell you. About the suggestions. I know why I won’t talk to my siblings.” He glances up to see both of them looking beseechingly at him. “They… they have certain proprietary opinions. They think they know me better than they do. Or maybe they know me too well, I don’t know—Kit makes me want to run away and Jacques makes me want to tear my hair out. If you’re going to be angry at me for anything, please pick an actual bad thing I’ve done.”

“I’m not angry at you,” says Beatrice, and she stretches out her hands to the two of them. They find each other’s hands too, quickly. “I’m frustrated I can’t do more to help you.”

“You think I’ll be happy if you give me what you would want,” says Lemony. “I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t to stay in one place forever. If that’s a deal-breaker you should tell me now.” He must see Bertrand’s face fall, because he looks away.

“I-I just miss you when you’re not here,” Bertrand mumbles. “And whatever you’re doing is dangerous. Someone tried to poison you yesterday.”

“Don’t worry about me. If they have nothing better than the laudanum-in-the-tea trick I’ll be fine. That hasn’t fooled me since I was thirteen.”

“If you ever need anyone taken care of,” says Beatrice, arching her eyebrows impressively.

“That wasn’t a complete sentence.”

“That’s how you do threats. I know you didn’t take _Bluffing and Intimidation_ , so that’s why I’m telling you this. You ought to take notes. Really, you ought to take the class. And that goes double for Bertrand.”

After he’s realized they aren’t going to leave for the night and made them comfortable (and shushed Beatrice the first five times she tries to start a conversation, and then given up to let her whisper to Lemony), Bertrand thinks about what he said. That he’ll never be the person they’re trying to make him into. That maybe it’s okay to not want to have very many friends or ever talk to your siblings. Beatrice has been sad for a long time that she never got a chance to have siblings, and Bertrand’s sister died, like his parents, in a fire. Neither of them can understand why Lemony wouldn’t cling to a sibling with everything he has, and it hurts them both. But maybe it hurts him too.

 

The next few assassination attempts are less funny. Lemony is shoved in front of a streetcar by someone in a crowd. During his interview at the _Eagle_ a secretary no-one has ever seen spends a lot of time trying to convince him to go to lunch with her and won’t take no for an answer. A dart narrowly misses hitting his neck, and when they take it to the laboratory later it’s tipped with poison.

“Who did you make angry!” Beatrice asks, gripping his hand so tightly her knuckles blanch.

“I.S.,” says Lemony. “If you crush my hand it will be slightly easier for them next time, but don’t let that stop you.”

Beatrice lets go, chagrined. “I’m sorry. But what are we going to do about it?”

“It’s too easy for them to find me,” says Lemony. “They know exactly where I am. I’ve stayed in the city too long.” Bertrand’s forehead falls onto Lemony’s shoulder in despair. Lemony probably _will_ be safer outside the city, but that doesn’t make Bertrand happier that he’s about to leave. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” says Lemony, stroking Bertrand’s hair. “You don’t know how much I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But it does.”

Bertrand shifts to face sideways so he can meet Beatrice’s eyes. She nods just slightly.

And so the next day at 2:17 AM they track him to the train station and watch him buy a ticket for a city far to the south. They then watch him sneak into the booth and exchange it for a different one to throw off anyone who asks the ticket seller. Only half an hour later Bertrand watches someone come to ask the ticket seller about him, a middle-aged man in a cap and a dark coat. He watches the man walk off to platform 12, and then he sprints down the station to find out where Beatrice followed Lemony. She points him out on platform 3, now disguised as an elderly woman—it’s the book that gives him away, the Guide to Medicinal Plants they recently bought him. Bertrand tells himself that this means he is thinking of them even while he flees for his life.

Lemony gets up after a while and goes to platform 5 to get on a train going east, and the two of them sneak onto the back, where Beatrice picks the lock to let them into the last car. It’s empty, not a passenger car today, and so they settle down to wait. At every stop they get off to see if he’s leaving, and at every stop he doesn’t leave. Between stops they practice their lines for the upcoming production of _Our Town_ ; Beatrice brought her script, though Bertrand didn’t think he would need his, and they read it in the dark car by flashlight when night starts to fall.

Lemony does not get off at the last stop, either. Or perhaps he’s in a new disguise now, and it’s too dark to pick out the cover of his book. In an unfamiliar city, almost two hundred miles from home, Bertrand and Beatrice stand in a deserted train station where Lemony Snicket may or may not have ever been, and they wonder what to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works Cited:  
> 1\. Two English Poems, II, Jorge Luis Borges.  
> 2\. La lluvia, Jorge Luis Borges


	7. A grave is such a quiet place

A tired-looking waitress comes to their table at Poppy’s Kitchen, chewing gum, and asks if they want anything to drink.

“Just water,” says Bertrand. “No ice, please.”

“Aw,” says the waitress, “I didn’t realize this was a sad occasion. And what about you, honey?”

“Well, since the world is so quiet here, I thought I’d get root beer. It doesn’t say on the menu, but you have root beer, right?”

 “Sure, I’ll get that right out for you.”

They get the check early, and on the back is a phone number and the words _Call me!—Delilah_ , along with a winking face.

“Who’s trying to contact us?” says Beatrice, frowning. “We already spoke to our mission contact.”

“Could they have confused us for another pair of volunteers?”

“Maybe…”

They finish their food quickly and hurry to the nearest phone booth to call Delilah. Bertrand can hear faintly through the receiver that the person who answers is a man with a croaking voice. “Yes? Who is this?” he says, and then coughs at length.

“That depends on who’s asking,” says Beatrice. “Who is _this_?”

“Beatrice?”

“Yes, this is she. Who are you?”

There’s a familiar understated laugh on the other end. “It’s nice to know that my vocal fry disguise worked,” says Lemony Snicket. “I’m glad to hear your voice again.”

Bertrand snatches the phone from her. “You have been missing for eight months! We thought you were dead!”

“Bertrand,” says Lemony. The tenderness in his voice that makes Bertrand feel a little bad for shouting, but mostly heartsick, mostly longing to hold him again. “That’s the idea. If you think I’m dead, then my enemies most likely do too. No-one has tried to kill me in almost two months, which is a record. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to come home permanently, but I do want to be able to write to you. I miss you both. There’s really only one person I can trust, and she’s a telegraph operator at the Stovepipe Wells office. Perhaps we will see each other again.”

“Don’t you dare hang up yet,” says Beatrice, now with her face pressed next to Bertrand’s so they can both hear. “You’d better tell me that you have a plan to get rid of the people who are trying to kill you, so that you _can_ properly come home. If necessary, we will be delighted to assist.”

“I can’t ask that of you,” says Lemony.

“But we can ask it of you,” says Bertrand. “We will be much happier if you let us help.”

“You will be in danger if I let you help. I’ll talk to you later. Not at this number, but in another way. Good-bye.”

“Stay safe,” says Bertrand, and his words trip over Beatrice saying, “I love you.” And then the line goes dead.

And so of course after their mission they don’t go home. They go to Stovepipe Wells. It’s a very small town in a desert with a terrible name, and by all rights it probably shouldn’t even have a telegraph office. But as a young boy hanging around outside the office tells them, “Everyone from all the other towns comes here to send telegrams.”

“How many operators are there here?” Bertrand asks him.

“Just two, me and Sally. I’m not working right now, but it beats being at home. I’m not supposed to bother Sally when she’s in there, but it’s not like we get a ton of messages here.”

“We’d like to talk to Sally.”

The boy shrugs. “I guess she’ll be mad at you instead of me. Sally, you got visitors!”

“Come on in, then,” says Sally’s voice from inside. They come in; the Stovepipe Wells telegraph office isn’t very different than any of the dozens of others Bertrand has been in, just smaller and perhaps a little more cluttered with paper. “You want to send a telegram?” asks Sally, a woman with dark skin and the squint of someone who spends a lot of time in the sun.

“We’re actually looking for someone who said he knows you,” says Beatrice. “Lemony Snicket. Do you know him?”

“I’ve never even heard the name. I have a very specific note somewhere around here to remind me that I have never heard of Lemony Snicket, especially if a young man and woman who do volunteer work come looking for him. You two don’t volunteer, do you?”

“Of course not,” says Bertrand quickly. “We just happen to do virtually free distribution.”

Sally raises her eyebrows. “Distribution of what?”

“Newspapers.” Beatrice takes this morning’s _Eagle_ out of her bag to put on Sally’s desk. There’s a meticulously researched article on the front page by Leonard Stricken, foreign correspondent, exposing human rights violations by the government. “That will be one penny. It’s only _virtually_ free.”

“That’s a pretty good deal,” says Sally. The thing she hands to Beatrice is not a penny, though. It’s a folded piece of paper that they will later decode and realize is a schedule of some sort. “Why don’t you come have dinner at my place later?” she says. “I get the feeling you’ll be in town for at least another day or two. And since we have no mutual friends, it only seems right to invite you. Henry will be there too, if you don’t mind him. Henry, I know you’re eavesdropping, why don’t you come in and meet our new friends. This is Bertie and Bea.”

Sally is friendly enough in her way, and Bertrand learns a great deal about electric telegraph operation, although he has already taken a class in telegraphy of all kinds. At precisely five she locks up and drives them in her truck to a small house on the edge of town where clearly Henry spends most of his nights. There’s not much fresh produce, but Beatrice manages to help create a delicious casserole and a very serviceable fruit salad. Bertrand spends most of that time trying to decode the paper Sally gave them while listening with half an ear to Henry talking about all the kinds of birds that are native to the desert with the terrible name. When Bertrand asks, he also explains the terrible name, and Bertrand writes it down in his notebook. He writes all of his notes in Snicket Shorthand, unless they need to be read by someone who isn’t him or Beatrice. When Henry asks why he writes in code, he tells him it’s faster and shows him a few of the ligatures common to Gregg shorthand.

In the end he has to ask Beatrice to help him decode the note, though. She’s always been much better with ciphers, and in fact makes them up for fun in her free time. This one is a modified version of something she and Lemony invented four years ago, just before his fateful apprenticeship—there are dates and times encoded in a recipe with a great many ingredients. Beatrice tells him the salad it makes is excellent and they should try it some time, so he writes it down in his notebook too.

There isn’t room in Sally’s house for both of them to sleep at once, so Beatrice stays up half the night. When she wakes Bertrand she also recites in a whisper a poem she composed:

> “I wouldn’t say it’s bright as day  
>  but yes, it’s bright as twilight.  
>  Every stone, round and alone  
>  is outlined in blue-gray ink.  
>  The moon is high, scrub still and dry  
>  in the desert, which I think  
>  is huge and cold and clearly holds  
>  a dark to swallow my light.”

Then she says, “Mind that you don’t forget it, because I will not remember it when I wake up. I can barely keep my eyes open. Good night.” She kisses him, narrowly missing his mouth, and falls onto the couch as if she’s already asleep.

He repeats it to himself, outside on the porch in the eerily bright light of the full moon. He didn’t understand quite what the poem meant when she recited it, but he does now. On new moon nights the desert would be black, lit only by faint starlight, and so vast that he could walk until the end of his life without ever seeing another person. To comfort himself he composes a second part to the poem as the sky begins to grow lighter in the east.

> I can see the dawn is coming on.  
>  The sky pales blue from violet.  
>  Then green from blue—all light, no hue—  
>  and then lemony pale gold.  
>  The flat shapes of night grow round in the light  
>  until each is a thing one may hold.  
>  Birds start to cry; it is no longer quiet  
>  and nothing like it was when twilit.

The sun shows its face in a notch between two mountains as he is writing down his part, and the sound of a distant truck interrupts the still air. Other people are starting to wake up. He goes inside and starts to examine what’s in the kitchen to see if he can make coffee quietly.

They follow Sally to work that day and entice her and Henry into playing Bridge with them, waiting for ten o’clock. It comes and goes. Sally seems untroubled. At 10:45 a truck pulls up outside the telegraph office. The door opens, and Lemony Snicket freezes halfway through saying “I would like to send a telegram.”

Bertrand stands up without even noticing; Beatrice throws herself at Lemony, and he’s so unprepared that he stumbles back and nearly falls off the steps. “What are you doing here?” he asks her, after he’s managed to escape her kiss.

“You told us, Lemony Snicket, that you knew and trusted a telegraph operator in Stovepipe Wells. And you thought we wouldn’t come to find her?”

“I meant that you should send me a telegram,” says Lemony. He looks charmingly ruffled, a little taller than he was eight months ago; he’s old enough to grow stubble now and looks tireder than he ever has. “And I remember specifically writing you a note, Sally, that said you were not to tell these two that you know me.” Even his faint reproachfulness is endearing, despite the fact that he was trying to hide from them.

“Must’ve lost it,” says Sally, unconcerned. “Henry, show me your hand, it’ll still do you good to figure out what you would have done if this oaf hadn’t showed up.”

Bertrand finally breaks the strange paralysis of trepidation and starts forward to take Lemony’s hand. “We missed you,” he says, and Lemony smiles faintly at the corner of the wall, and Bertrand kisses him.

“For rain it hath a friendly sound,” says Lemony, and kisses him again, and reaches out for Beatrice’s hand. “To one who’s six feet underground; and scarce the friendly voice or face: a grave is such a quiet place.”

 _The world is quiet here_ , thinks Bertrand, and then wishes not to have thought it. That is not what it meant at all. That is not it, at all. But what he says is, “Especially in the desert. But you could stay here in hiding. We’d know where to find you, and people would stop trying to kill you.”

“At what cost?”

“At no cost, you ridiculous boy,” says Beatrice. She starts to push the two of them outside. Henry is, after all, a known eavesdropper.

“At the cost,” says Lemony, “of ceasing to do the important work I do. I saw that you read it.”

“If people trying to kill you is the cost of that work, perhaps you shouldn’t do it,” says Bertrand. But when he looks to Beatrice for support, she is looking at Lemony with a strange sad grimace.

“Some work _is_ more important than one life,” she says.

“Beatrice!”

“ _But_. I would very much appreciate it if you sometimes took a few days off to see your poor worried girlfriend and boyfriend. The hideous crimes of the world will still be there next week.”

Lemony starts crying, and very quickly Bertrand does too, although they must have different reasons. Bertrand is crying because there is no-one who will try to convince Lemony not to risk his life to repair the world. No-one but him is going to tell Lemony that he has his mitzvot in the wrong order of importance. And if Bertrand tells him, Lemony will not listen.

They spend the day in Lemony’s stolen truck, driving at speed into the mountains along roads that throw up great plumes of dust behind them. Under the cold stars Beatrice and Bertrand recite their pieces of their poem, because it feels important. And when Beatrice has fallen asleep Bertrand kisses Lemony desperately, seized by the premonition that he will be gone in the morning. There is little in his life that has been sweeter than making Lemony Snicket gasp and cling to his wrists and kiss him back with just as much desperation.

But in the morning they wake up a quarter of a mile from the train station in a stolen truck, and Lemony is gone.

 

Reader, please stop reading now. I don't want to write this conclusion any more than you want to read it.

I would like to tell you that they will make it work. I would like to say that Lemony Snicket will eventually find a less dangerous way to repair the world and settle down in a large house with the people he loves. But you and I both know how this story ends: with a string of faked deaths, a shipwreck, a fire, and a very bad new beginning. Bertrand, Beatrice, and Lemony will have a few more years together, but they will see each other less and less frequently, and eventually Lemony will stop picking up telegrams in Stovepipe Wells and no-one else will know why. He will be reported dead as an unknown body found on the shore of the sea, but positively identifiable in the photograph. Bertrand and Beatrice will continue to mistake being in love with Lemony for being in love with each other so long that it becomes true. They will eventually decide to name their son after him, and then they will name their son instead for Bertrand’s grandfather. They will not forget Lemony, but the pain of his death will dull with time in the same way that the pain he feels—watching them build their life together from behind newspapers and domino masks—never will.

After the fire, the only thing that will be left of their correspondence (apart from whatever is still in Lemony Snicket’s possession) is a telegram, pasted into a thick book entitled _A Series of Unfortunate Events_ , which contains a fragment of a poem.

> Today the sun’s the furtive one  
>  and I the one in plain sight;  
>  it draws the clouds around like shrouds  
>  to shelter it from the rain.  
>  I hope you know I love you—so  
>  I never will see you again.  
>  Sealed with a kiss. Please treasure this  
>  and the memory of faint light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works Cited:  
> 1\. Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay.


End file.
